


The Shoulder of the Sky

by onewomancitadel



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Not Trying To Be TROS, Redemption, Resurrection (Technically Not Dead), Self-Actualisation in the Other, TROS Prediction/Hope, The Transformative Power of Love, Yearning, happy endings, homecomings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-27 08:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21389197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onewomancitadel/pseuds/onewomancitadel
Summary: “Come on, the sun has set low. Maybe we should head back, sweetheart.”Rey didn’t want to leave.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey
Comments: 4
Kudos: 40





	The Shoulder of the Sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Corseque (Besagew)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Besagew/gifts).

> Here it is. 
> 
> This is my blood, sweat, and tears, in the leadup to the premiere of the Rise of Skywalker. The galaxy-brain level theory by Twitter user @intpslytherin97 that Kylo resurrects Rey gave clear direction to this fic. 
> 
> I also kind of accidentally got back into writing, specifically Reylo, because of @corseque who inspired me to make a blog and rejoin fandom after a long hiatus. So this is officially for you! Thank you for my daily bread!
> 
> This was a self-indulgent effort above all, though. Credit where's due to our blessed Mary Oliver for the epigraph, and Star Wars itself. Oh, and the title is from the lyrics somebody transcribed for The Expanse opening soundtrack on YouTube!
> 
> Soundtrack is just heartsigh by Purity Ring on repeat. It sounds like light shining through the veil of death.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again. 

_ Mary Oliver_

A long time ago

in a galaxy far, far away...

Rey died. But the Dark took her, too, and in the darkness, she followed the web spun by Kylo Ren: the fire, the fire, fire, always the burning. It ripped through her.

She was alone. Nobody knew her. There was no home to return to, no way to fight the void by herself. She came from death and to death she would return.

*

The candle grew low and sizzled out. The wax had long since given up defeat and fled past the stone holder, but Ben did not care. He could read plenty fine in the dark. Shadows danced on the wall in the last lingering light, but he did not look up to see them since he paid all his midnight attention to the Jedi text before him. It wasn’t especially ancient, all things considered—modern, in fact—but the text itself was a copy of a copy of a long-lost manuscript. Ben would have given his left leg up to read it. He did not have to, in the end, being that Luke had bartered a lightsaber for it.

Luke would call it bartering. Ben would call it swindling. It was just like his dad. Maz Kanata apparently knew him.

Maz Kanata had inspected him soundly, shrewd gaze worn and ancient, full of life.

“Big nose,” she said.

Luke had drifted over to the corner of the bar and was getting drinks. Ben didn’t drink. Ben wanted to read his rare manuscript.

“You have your mother’s eyes,” Kanata said to him, gripping his arm. Sweat beaded in his armpits. “And your grandfather’s before you.”

“Your eyes are very big,” he stuttered.

She dropped the glasses. “All the better to see you with.”

He had gone to find Luke just to get out of there.

“Do I get to read it first?”

Luke rolled his eyes. “What, you think anybody else wants to?”

“It’s a long-lost Jedi manuscript. I don’t see how anybody wouldn’t want to.”

“Yeah, not sure about that lost sleep, though.” Masterly, Luke winks.

“I’m not doing anything illicit.”

“Falling asleep in class.”

“I only fall asleep when it’s boring. Or beneath me.” Ben coughs into his hand and adds, “Master Luke.”

“Such arrogance,” Luke mutters, and for a moment Ben thinks he’s crossed a line, but then he laughs. Ben has a feeling not many Jedi masters are like him. The first sign was the fact that Luke was alive and all the others are dead.

So. Not like the others.

“The Force can only be studied for so long,” Luke said wisely, “before you have to give in and feel it instead.”

“I can’t reach out and find it if I don’t know what I’m even looking for.”

“You’ll need glasses one day.”

“I won’t,” Ben said, “I can just use the Force.”

“To fix your vision?”

“I’m sure,” he said, “some esoteric Jedi writer came up with a way, and it’s been lost to time.”

“You can invent it.”

Ben half-smiles. Luke sounds like he’s joking. He didn’t look up to see the half-proud gleam in his eye.

He just wanted to go back to his hut.

So that was where he was. The minute they’d stepped off their excursion ship Ben had bounded off with the last, final inheritance of Shika’s writing.

“Thief!” Luke called.

“I’ll bring it back, Master Luke!”

“You won’t!”

Ben probably wouldn’t. Luke wouldn’t mind.

He didn’t leave his room for three days. By the third night he discovered, as the wick collapsed, he had run out of candles.

The manic energy of discovery, of the presence of the Force fluttering outside his window called to him. He went to meditate by the stream.

“Once you step in,” Luke had said, one of the first bright days of his Jedi training that Ben sorely hated, “the stream is no longer the same once you leave.”

Ben had thought it stupid. He was dry before he stepped in and wet when he left; of course _he_ was different. It was palpably observable. But the stream did not dry nor wet; it never had such a state to choose.

He still came here. He still drifted his fingers, and closed his eyes, and listened to the night singing out a desperate call.

Ben could lose himself in a fever in the Dark. _But the Light could guide. _It could instruct, if Ben would deign to be instructed. He was a bad student, but a better teacher.

The Light could set out a torch, and it could be seen from one end of the universe to the other. It would reach eventually. It would always, always reach, unable to be surpassed. The true power of Light, Ben thought, came in patience few had. The Dark was always more obvious and treacherous, creeping in and consuming with an attractive totality.

But the Light came. The Light waited. The Light played the long game.

Ben resurfaced the next morning to birdsong. The fugue of study left him contemplative. He might have said he didn’t hate being here anymore.

He got used to being alone, anyway. Not least for the bird chatter. One had a bright red chest, sitting on the branch above him, and it heaved in and out. Ben copied its call. Another flew down, and sat beside it, and they had a little choir.

He looked out across the clearing of trees and then he stood up and left. He brushed the dirt off his bottom.

Luke’s hut, at the crest of the hill, had plumes of smoke trailing from the chimney. Ben knocked.

“I have some questions,” he said through the door.

“You know _I _haven’t even looked at it yet.” Luke’s voice came through muffled and he opened the door with puffy eyes. He must not have been awake for long.

“I thought Jedi Masters were supposed to all be morning people.”

“Yeah, well, stereotypes, kiddo.”

“What would your master have to say about it?”

For a moment Luke looked sad, and tired, and oddly old. Ben geared himself up for a poor reaction. His mouth always worked before his head.

Then he laughed.

“Oh,” Luke said, motioning Ben inside, “oh, I do wonder.”

The chair reserved for Ben had the pillow where he liked it. He was glad no one else sat in it.

“So,” Luke began, stirring tea leaves in the pot and bringing off the boil, “do tell, Ben.”

“Can Light healing bring someone back from the dead?”

Luke floundered with his cup for a minute and then he looked up at Ben with wide eyes.

Ben continued, “Because I would suspect it’s incapable of it, at least until Force energy leaves after body death. The harmonic order would be all off. But,” and Luke looked at him like he regretted becoming a master and inviting Ben in, he hastily added, “I was reading about a Force technique—”

Luke gripped his nose bridge and Ben stopped for a moment. Then Luke motioned for him to keep going so Ben did.

“—a Force technique for guiding energy, if a soul is lost.”

“That would be literally for finding somebody lost. Not dead.”

“I don’t know.” Ben hesitated. “Has it been tried?”

Luke muttered, “That’s always it, isn’t it.”

“Because if this is a lost text, Master...”

“You can’t call me Master just to make me listen, Ben.”

“I’m only trying to be respectful.”

Luke gave him a look and then passed the tea. “Did you use boiling water?” Ben asked.

“No. Under boiling, like you said.”

“Lest the leaves burn.”

“Picky,” Luke said.

“The text,” Ben said, “had an odd translation.”

“Which is?”

“The translations for _soul _and _guiding. _And if _guide _is referring to the soul physically or metaphorically. Also, the nominative case is being inferred, where two references might appear.”

“So then what do you think?”

“The author’s style is... unusual,” Ben starts, “it reads poetically.”

“Not unusual for the original text. All the academic texts would have been poetic. Maybe the problem is the copies changed it to prose?”

“I might find some elucidation in breaking up the metred lines.”

“Why do you even come here?”

“Mom says I need the sunshine,” Ben said.

“That you do. And something to eat. You’re a physical form as much as a spiritual, Ben. And the physical demands breakfast.”

Ben nodded.

“Come back to me when you figure out the trouble,” Luke said, “but I do doubt it’s a technique for _resurrection_. Or it could even be applied that way. It disrupts the natural order. And what do we say about disrupting the natural order?”

“It’s bad,” Ben said.

“That’s right.”

“But the natural order is our essence enduring in the Force beyond our mortal coil.”

“Can you not call it that,” Luke said, and didn’t ask.

“If our essence endures, then the question would be if it’s possible to guide that back. If I’m given the ability, Master Luke, to reach into the Force...”

“It’s there for us to reconcile ourselves with it.”

“Do you call it reconciling when you use the Force to get tea from bed?”

Luke said nothing and pursed his lips.

Ben sipped his tea.

“You would have to guide somebody from the other side of the Force,” Luke said. “The Dark, and the dead. But it’s a Light technique. A massive amount of—” he cuts himself off. “It would need the right circumstances. You would look death in the face. You might die, yourself.”

“It’s academic,” Ben said. “You don’t need to worry.”

“I know,” Luke says, vaguely stern, “I know.”

Ben wondered what the face of death looked like. If it were comprehensible. A side of the Force. If he could reach in and feel life everywhere, and the death of everything, it must not be that terrible. It would be akin to being born again.

*

Rey was too jittery to sleep. It came uneasily, shucking her blanket on and off, watching the light trickle through a small gap in the makeshift ceiling of her warframe.

She had considered patching it up, but sometimes, like this, late at night, she felt less scared in the dark.

With her head off the pillow, she slept.

Her dreams were moving and shifting. She saw them through half-shut eyes, unable to discern them: an ocean, an island, the island surrounded by an ocean, waves beating ceaselessly. The warmth of the sun on her back.

“Come on,” said a voice, “The sun has set low. Maybe we should head back, sweetheart.”

Rey only knew she did not want to leave. She always trekked out too far for scavenging, but it wasn’t that. The ocean was receding, and it was above her and below her.

It was warm. It reminded her of a memory, of a memory, of a field she had never seen, growing ripe and heavy with spring. She had never seen green. Never a green like that: lustrous, the overgrowth so free and so joyous she could almost touch it.

Her hand outstretched and only glanced a blade of grass. She didn’t know what it felt like.

Rey believed that she should.

She woke before dawn, sure that, today would be different.

When Rey stood outside her husk of a home, she took her hand-drawn map out and held it up to the light. She had marked where she was going in charcoal, so she made sure not to smudge it. There was some hydraulic spray she’d pilfered that worked well to seal it, but she’ll revise and reuse the paper later. She was good at that.

Her canteen was full. A spare portion sat warmly in her sling, burning like a secret. The sky was clear, and Rey could see no reason foreboding storm to make her turnaround. Not now.

So she reached out her first step and then she started walking, and she kept walking, and she only turned around once. She would be back soon enough, if anybody thought to come by; surely her parents, if they happened to return at such a bad time, would see all those marks and know. Know that she was waiting.

After all, they weren’t for her.

When she reached the crest of a dune, sweaty with the high sun, Rey surveyed her path.

It was up and up and up.

The portion could wait.

Overhead a ship about the size of 500 portions—enough to feed Rey for too many scratches on the wall—seemed to lose its thrusters and plummeted quite dramatically. The explosion was impressive, even in her horror. The debris flung so far Rey nearly felt it, but it was far off enough that no shrapnel hit her. She heard it and saw it only.

Her heart told her to go and check. Her head and her stomach told her to keep marching. No way there were survivors; in fact, as she turned her gaze away, she remembered the crash she had seen only ten or so scratches ago. The other another thirty.

Sometimes she wondered if people only came to Jakku to die.

It was Rey’s job to search for the parts leftover.

She reached a treacherous incline and felt her back and legs start to give way, but she had not come so far yet to give up. Few had gone this far north, and nobody had ever told her why. Not many around bothered to tell.

She had looked too strange to them anyway. A funny little human with three buns that, on anybody else, might pass for some strange ears. Or antlers.

It just marked her, that was all.

When her parents came back she would tell them about everything she got up to. She knew they’d had to go, for whatever reason—she didn’t think about it. No. She would tell them how many hills she’d climbed, all by herself and her own rationings, and how hard it was to scale. Every night she made her own meal, and worked desert grass into dolls, and in a secret corner of her ship she would scrape out shapes on the wall. One time she’d tried her hand, but it hadn’t worked out so well.

And her ship knowledge, too. She’d be helpful with that if they were to go flying off Jakku. It was funny how much she had learnt simply pulling ships apart. She understood how they all got put together.

Of course, the funniest time had been when she’d actually turned a ship back on.

Rey narrated to herself, practising for telling it one day: _I hadn’t suspected it was still running... most were derelict! You wouldn’t believe it, I’d stuck my hand straight into some wiring without checking, and I was _zapped. _There was only airconditioning running, but I took the unit and installed it in my AT-TT, isn’t that good? I’ve got aircon! In the desert! Oh, I took the battery too. _

Rey got cold at night, of course.

_The desert drops so low at night, you’d never expect it. Prepare yourself with blankets. That’s what always gets people in Jakku. Not only the heat, but the terrible cold. Oh, I used to freeze as a kid, but I’m good at it now. There are some huts out east built below the ground, and they’re cold all year round, all day._

Rey saved the stories, one by one, all the facts, so she’d be good at regaling them. Maybe even take her family on a tour of Jakku, of course, depending if they’d like it.

_There was where I nearly drowned in the sinking sands... oh, here I found a modulator that scored me four portions! I gave myself a day off. I was nearly abducted here. Twice. Didn’t try again after that, of course. _

She had narrated four more journeys to herself when she made it to her destination.

What was one more, after all, and this would be a good one.

*

“So, Ben,” Luke said, “I got word Leia’s coming to visit tomorrow.”

“I already have my essay done,” Ben said, “I can hand it in today.”

Luke sipped his tea with a chiding expression. “I don’t care about the essay, hand it in whenever. I’m wondering if you’d like to do anything with her.”

“I don’t know.”

“Teenagers,” Luke muttered.

“I heard that.”

“So you should.” He set his tea down and peered out the window of his hut mysteriously. “We could take her on a visit around the grounds.”

“Again,” Ben said. “Besides. I don’t think you know my mother well if you think she’d enjoy a tour.”

Luke grimaced. “Well, I’m trying.”

“I think you need to stop being so slack with submission times.” Ben set his empty cup down. “It’s confusing. I don’t like it.”

“Are you telling me to be more strict?”

“You need it, Master,” Ben said, “The other students might become complacent.”

Luke rolled his eyes. “How about you show Leia your collection, then.”

“I doubt she cares for esoteric Jedi texts either.”

“Alright, then, Ben, you can figure out a mother-son activity yourself,” Luke said. “But parents are important.”

Ben might have said something about the divorce, or his Force powers making his father high-tail it out, but he didn’t. He was a black sheep, but not that much of one.

“The visit will go over quickly, I’m sure,” Luke said.

Ben wanted his mother to stay.

Sometimes, Ben wanted to go. Where, he did not know.

He cleared his throat and pursed his mouth. “How long do you think she’ll be here?”

“A few days between appointments.”

“Is she going to be tutoring us?”

“No? Why do you say that, Ben?”

“The Jedi used to have a political role,” Ben said, “Before the fall of the Republic.”

“We’re not that kind of Jedi anymore.”

“I see,” Ben said, disappointed.

*

Ben watched it all burn.

He saw it, again and again, the temple burning, his hut destroyed; Luke dead; in the terror of waking he had seen himself dead. Ben knew he deserved that, but he was too selfish to allow it.

Ben needed to flee.

But it was all on fire. His classmates would figure out where he had gone, and come to finish the job Luke started. After all, their master was deceased.

It was his fault.

It was his blood.

His manscripts were destroyed, but he had salvaged one. The only Light technique worth keeping. Like he needed the rest, if all he was meant to do was die.

If that was what his uncle wanted, then so be it. If this was all he had left, then so be it. If his parents didn’t want him, then he’d leave.

It was easier to run. Defeating his classmates would only waste time.

The fire danced a dangerous, ancient movement, and it consumed: in the fire Ben saw his future. Ben kept looking back. Ben kept looking back, and back, and air that night was colder than it had ever been.

*

A blazing fire at Niima outpost had left her on emergency rations for days.

She was not sure how the fire took place, who set it, who put it out. Only that it had happened and it was burnt. The structure remained, but not the food, nor the pride of Unkar Plutt.

Unkar Plutt looked at her funny when she had surveyed the debris.

“You there,” he said, as if to start blaming her for it.

She raised her arms in defense. “Don’t look at me, I was scavenging.”

“Then stop hanging around.”

“I don’t ever intend to stay,” she said. “When will you reopen, then?”

“When we open.”

“Helpful, that.” The economy on Jakku was not lively, after all.

“Out before I take your portions!”

“Your portions are all burnt,” she spat.

She decided to turn back and have a rest. The last time had been fifty scratches ago, and conserving her energy would be more helpful. She could journal. Or draw a new map.

She was restless. She wanted to leave.

But she knew she had to wait. There was something she was waiting for—her parents—her home, but she had dreams of it consumed by wildfire.

*

The Resistance was full of good people. They had a small base. Rey had a place to sleep. She had food to scavenge for. It was like being home.

But it wasn’t.

She went for a walk.

The grass, momentous and vividly green, blowing in the breeze, skittered and brushed against her calves. In her arms she carried her plunder: herbs, and plants to cook with, plants to heal with. The yellow bulb flower, though, she had knotted together into a grown and wore it upon her head. It balanced somewhat precariously. Sunlight streamed through the leaves, and the dappled shadow was achingly familiar, in the dream-like way that came in waking. Unnameable, but soundly sleeping, distantly calling.

The flutter of a branch came. She turned her gaze slowly, hearing bark creak, unfamiliar and familiar all at once.

Rey saw nothing. Just the movement of the trees and finery. But she continued searching for a few moments longer in futility.

Like a child, she looked away coyly. Then back. Maybe the shadow would return.

She had not seen him since the door of the _Falcon _closed.

The Falcon was lovely in its strangeness, in its stretched and skewed corridors, labyrinthine and long-loved. Rey couldn’t help inheriting some of the fondness.

In the corner of her eye light flashed as stars in hyperspace. It felt more like a projection than a true sight, and she wondered if it was a vision. But the feeling was too sentimental, too young. It carried like a memory. The Falcon flying, but across a different stream of space, in a different stream of time.

It washed over her, and she heard Han laugh, dry and younger than she remembered.

She kept walking.

*

“There’s something you need to know,” Rey said.

Leia waited. Rey knew what she already needed to say, but she could hardly express it.

“Leia,” she said slowly. If Rey were better socialised, she might have taken Leia’s hand then. Leia seemed to sense it and placed her own on Rey’s shoulder.

“Go on.”

She blurted out, “Can you feel it?”

“The Force?”

“Yes.”

“I felt Luke return to the Force,” Leia said. “I hadn’t felt him in so long. We were connected when we were born.”

Rey squeezed her hand.

"It was... it was good to feel him again, before he left.”

Rey nodded. “Then,” Rey said, “do you know...”

Surely she could. Even if he did not appear to her, she could feel him in the very strings of her muscles, the push and pull of her blood from her heart to her head to her toes. The ground thudded with the gush of it, and the air quivered. Luke could feel it even freshly returned to the Force: never gone, always there.

It had been there all her life. In her dreams. In her wakeless sleep. In her sleepless wake.

Leia closed her eyes, waited, and then she nodded.

Rey felt wetness on her cheek—she did not know where it came from. It was not her own sadness, or fear, or happiness. She felt a hand cup her cheek but as if the large hand were her own.

“Is it? Is it really?” Leia asked, with a quiet wonder.

“You recognise it?”

“Of course,” she said and at that she smiled. Leia looked old, a strange kind of happiness writ on her face. Meditative, bittersweet, but sweet all the same.

“You know what this means, though,” Rey said, her voice not yet breaking, “He can see me. He can see the Resistance.”

“He already could, before I knew now. And he didn’t do anything, did he?”

Rey said presently, “He didn’t.”

Because he did not come with her. He did not come with her.

“You intend to meet with him, then.”

“I do.”

Something in the Force, something there lurking. He and her led somewhere, eventually—she knew it.

“Leia?” Rey asked in a small voice.

Leia cried, too, but if Rey weren’t wrong it looked happy. She wrapped Rey in her arms, where she felt unwieldy and too tall, unused to the action but returning to muscle memory: a mother embracing a daughter, and returning and flipped again, a mother embracing her son.

*

At night she tried to sleep. She turned over at least three times, twice on each side, then flipped over onto her stomach. Sweat caught between her thighs, the thin woven blanket twisting through her. Rey had watched Poe churn it out.

“I have the vision of a pilot,” he had said, “And the nimble fingers of a seamstress.”

“Is that a saying?” Fin had added.

“It’s not a saying,” Rey had said. “He just made it up.”

“You were raised on a desert planet, though.”

“I learnt it from Leia,” Poe had added helpfully.

She did not notice it when it first came, but the fingers tangled in her hair stir a memory before her own birth: before she had crawled out, before she had even been conceived.

In fact, she did not even notice him jostle her, and lift her delicately to place her head in his lap. The comfort of his body warmth, and the softness of his skin carding through her let-down buns were a lullaby.

“My mother told me,” Kylo said, in a soft whisper, gentler than his very own mournful eyes, “She had always felt the darkness in me. Even carrying me.”

Rey did not know it apart from dream, or memory, or waking. He is simply always there, nestled between all planes of her mind and reality and that which the Force seeps into. Her eyes fluttered, not quite seeing him, only feeling.

“But she said, when I first kicked, she felt a burst of light. Perhaps she said it to make me feel better, to make my destiny not so clear. But she was never very good at that.”

Rey won’t hear the ending if she falls asleep, so she tried to keep her eyes open.

“She was never very good at lying. I think she told the truth, or what she thought the truth was.”

The light, always there. Rey tried to nod. It was true.

“It was the last time I saw her,” Kylo finished, “I’m sure she thought she had tried enough.”

“Leia cried,” Rey mumbled, the lull of his voice crooning her to sleep, “Leia cried so much.”

He didn't respond, and Rey wondered if he was tired too. He must be so tired.

“When I told her...” she started, and started again, “She was so happy.”

She felt his breath come out long, and slow, warm, fingers stilling in their motion in her scalp, drifting off pleasantly.

*

Rey was dying.

Kylo felt it. Kylo knew, suddenly, he would die with her. The bond was the connective tissue of all things: when he reached out and touched the blanket on his bed, or took his gloves off to feel something with his unearthly skin, or held her face in the dream of a dream of a lost-dream, it was her hand. It was her bed.

When he washed his face in the bathroom hers reflected in the water. When he thought of his candle burning low he saw the desert sun that never set in summer. It beat on endlessly, the light taking and taking and taking.

Everything around him went to silence. What Kylo felt beyond him—that had taken Rey—was not Dark and it was not Light. It was a black hole. It was whatever death and life was not. It did not even have the dignity to borrow or to steal, it only did not exist, and it could not be present, and it would not bother to take when it could erase.

Kylo ignored it.

Kylo had seen all facets of the Dark. In the cave. In Rey. Inside himself. In Snoke. In the First Order.

The Dark was so familiar it was a home inside a bombed-out shelter.

He knew, suddenly, that this was beyond the ken of the Dark. This job could only be accomplished by the Light, that heard of all things living.

He held her, like the time in the forest. In his arms.

“Rey,” he said. That was all he needed to say.

“Ben,” she whispered, faint. “We lost.”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

Perhaps she had finally chipped away at all his corners. Perhaps he admitted that she had finally won. Or perhaps it was because, for once, this was where the Light was more powerful.

And only Kylo could have known. He kept, and he stole, and he possessed: that fateful barter, of a legacy lightsaber for Rey’s life.

The Light embraced him like a lost lover. The wind grew strong, and the sky was a heavy black with a foreboding storm. He stood before it small. Where he commanded the Force before, he knew to study. There was something on the wind.

Now he listened and it sang out.

It was bright and pure. It was like staring truth in the face. It answered every question he had, it told him to come home and stop lurking outside for so long in the cold. It threw open the door of a warm house with a kindling fire, a candle burning by a stack of books. It told him home was always waiting for him and his mother and father missed him and loved him. It told him that just this morning Luke had been waiting at the top of the hill with tea and a new manuscript. It told him that she loved him and had always loved him. That she loved him in the past life and all the newly anointed ones. It told him this had been going on for too long and would he hold her? Would he carry her home? For once Kylo could answer the Force, calling, _Yes, I will. I will hold her and carry her home. _

He expected to see death and to look it in the eye. Instead he saw his reflection. He closed his eyes.

In it, a thousand faces stared back, repeating and retracting in the Light and into the Light: out from the cold, cold night, following the path home, searching for Rey.

Always searching for Rey. Where had she gone? Where would she go, lost and dead, waiting for him to hurry up?

Kylo was too slow. Kylo was good at running.

Rey was good at waiting.

“I’ll come back for you, sweetheart,” he said, and he hoped she heard him, across the Force, through the fabric of his very self, “I promise.”

He had seen her dreams: he knew how long she had waited and how long she had wanted. Always Jakku, always back to Jakku, when her parents would return, and there would be a good story to tell.

Always Jakku.

So he waited on Jakku.

He watched her live her whole life alone, and a silent sentinel, he waited. The Light danced in every single singing cell in his body, and it glittered perfectly. It was where he belonged.

It was where she belonged.

He waited for years, and seconds.

She was never alone.

Each day she marked a day on the wall, and Kylo was dead with her. Kylo would die for her, but he decided now he would live instead.

*

He found her.

“Everybody thinks they know me,” Rey said, “Nobody does.”

He felt the waves of death and dying exude from her: standing near her hurt. Watching her in pain hurt. The wind beat sand up around them furiously.

Then, with surety, he said, “But I do.”

Rey didn’t weep. He watched the anger on her face, the sweat stuck to her forehead, the heaving of her chest.

“Are you going to try and convince me, then? Turn me back?” she snarled. “We already lost.”

He said, “It’s not too late.”

A shadow passed her expression.

“It’s never too late,” he said, and terribly, he believed it. Fiercely, he believed it. It was such a strong certainty he had only ever felt for Rey: for the way she had seen him in every way, the way she had made a home in the Dark as she died.

“I feel it,” she said.

“I know.”

“If you stay here,” she slowly said, between every angry breath, “Then you’ll die, too.”

“Then help me, Rey,” he said,

“Help you how? Your vision was right. I turned. Over the fire, you saw it. You saw this happen to me. I saw you turn. They were both true.”

The look on her face was one waiting to be cut down.

Kylo would do no such thing. “Rey, you don’t need to hold onto it anymore,” he said.

She stepped forward, gently, footsteps in the sand silent, the sky turning pearlescent. Jakku was a dead place. Jakku was where people went to die.

“It hurts,” he said, reaching forward to grip her forearm, “It hurts, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“It hurts.”

“All of it,” she said, and the sob that wracked from her was like cleansing rain finally breaking through.

“You can rest,” he said, “Just let me carry you. I’ll take you home.”

“I’m already dead,” she said.

Carefully, he took her into his arms, surrounding her, her surrounding him, the horizon washed away. He said, “I know the way back.”

*

Rey lived. She wasn't alone. She had never been alone.

When the Force gave way, hurrying her out of its womb water, she and Ben returned together. She met his gaze, and she knew him, now, darkly, wonderfully, in the Light and the Dark.

It was never too late.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, please let me know what you think. I leapt out of bed this morning on hardly any sleep just to check my notifications on AO3!!! I am really like that.
> 
> Most of all, I hope you enjoyed it. There's only a short window of time until TROS, but I hope this fills a gap.


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